Brian touted me as a “recent recipient of the TSA’s Scruffy Beard Award, a template for its new facial recognition for potential terrorist software.”
I replied that “it’s possible to take the boy out of the mountains but you can’t take the mountains out of the boy.” Or at least that’s my excuse this week for the beard.
Regarding coverage of the New Hampshire primary, Brian derided media bias: “The CBS and AP have each published articles detailing how only New Hampshire Rednecks, deplorables, gun and Bible-huggers, and high school graduates voted for Trump, while college-educated, white-collar, Mensa and DAR members, corporate officers, and everyone on the raised-pinkie roster voted for Nikki Haley.”
I commented: “The media still thinks it’s standing on Mount Olympus, waiting to judge every different group of the American populace.” I observed that the same pattern prevailed “all the way back since 1980 when the media denigrated Ronald Reagan supporters. It was if people had to be some kind of racist gun owner knucklehead in order to support this Hollywood guy instead of Jimmy Carter, who was in the Navy and did not sink any submarines there.”
I commented that there was even greater hostility nowadays towards libertarians: “If you’re in favor of individual freedom, you are presumed to hate humanity.” (Shades of the World Economic Forum!)
We smacked around TSA’s latest surveillance idiocy. I commented, “It doesn’t matter how much the TSA screws up, the Washington establishment assumes the answer is to give them more power and let them intrude further into people’s lives.” I said the real problem with TSA facial scans is that they might “identify people with total contempt towards the TSA, and that could block me forever from flying.”
Brian mentioned that John Kerry was leaving his post as Biden’s Special Holy Climate Envoy to work on the president’s re-election campaign. I scoffed that Kerry would be in charge of Swift Boat Veterans for Climate Change.
I had a “nice day” when USA Today published my story on those TSA boneheads at the Portland Airport.
HELLUVA SHOW! I heard it all!